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Calella, Award for the Best Smart Tourism Destination

Calella, Award for the Best Smart Tourism Destination

The project "Smart Destination" of Calella has received recognition from the specialized press.

Last Thursday, June 6, a delegation of the Municipality of Calella picked up the "Best Smart Tourism Destination Award" during the XXIV Night of Tourism of Catalonia, organized annually by the Catalan Association of Journalists of Economy and Tourism.

The Mayor of Calella and Councilor for Tourism, Montserrat Candini, said that "this award compensates the effort we made in relation to what we call smart city. To make the best decisions we must have the maximum information that allows efficient and useful tourism governance".

This recognition brings visibility to the project initiated in 2017, when the roadmap on the model of intelligent tourist destination was defined with the aim of strengthening its leadership in the tourism activity of the Maresme region by making it compatible with economic sustainability, social and environmental.

From this roadmap, which was also defined by the opinions of the locals and business of the city, two priority axes of short-term work were identified: tourism governance from a transversal perspective and the development of an intelligence system for making operational and strategic decisions.

Regarding tourism governance, the first project derived from the roadmap is the proposal to create a technical office of intelligent tourist destination, which will coordinate in a transversal way all the actions that are already being developed from Calella under the orbit "smart"and involving up to 12 departments of the City Council, thus confirming that transversality of tourism with the aim of implementing a global vision of the destination shared by all departments of the consistory.

For this purpose, an inventory of more than 50 actions that are already underway within the consistory has been carried out, which are related both to the concept of "smart city" (with greater focus on the provision of services to the citizen), as well as to the concept of "intelligent destination" (with emphasis on the experience of the visitor and the image of the destination).

Regarding the second priority axis, focused on knowledge to improve decision making, the City Council of Calella has presented the first module of its tourist intelligence system, in this case focused on the massive analysis of the experience of the visitor of the municipality, which already accumulates more than 73,000 opinions regarding the image of the accommodations, restaurants and attractions of the destination.

Among the main conclusions of this study of image and reputation based on the big data generated by users on the Internet, highlights the valuation of resources such as the Roca Grossa Beach or the Lighthouse of Calella, and has allowed identifying the main areas of potential improvement in different sectors, establishments and resources.

To this first module of the new tourist intelligence system will be added new layers of knowledge from different departments of the City Council and other regional and state institutions, as well as other potential sources of data, such as mobile telephone operators, with those that have already maintained several contacts.

This project, which has been supported by the company Vivential Value, specializing in innovation in tourism intelligence, has received financial and technical support from Diputació de Barcelona as part of its commitment to the new smart management models for cities and destinations in the province, and has already been selected to participate as a case study in national and international events.